[296] in Athena User Interface
Star Office goes GPL
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Jul 19 12:11:04 2000
Message-ID: <AtRRAIcGgE6e148gQ0@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 12:11:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@MIT.EDU, apse@MIT.EDU
Page C14 Wall Street Journal 19 July 2000:
(Reprinted verbatim without permission, please limit circulation
to avoid Copyright infringement.)
PALO ALTO, Claif, -- Sun Microsystems Inc. today will detail its plans
to release an "open source" version of its StarOffice
office-productivity software, in its latest attempt to undercut
Microsoft Corp. and its popular Office software.
Marco Boerries, a Sun official who founded the German company that
created StarOffice, said Sun will give away the basic programming code
for the combined word-processing, spreadsheet and Web browsing software
with virtually no strings attached under a well-established agreement
known as the "GNU General Public License." On similar occasions in the
past, Sun has often imposed restrictive licensing conditions even when
it makes its source code availble, often as a way of maintaining control
over the software itself.
Mr. Boerries argued that the open-source release of StarOffice has a
"huge potential" to shift the marketplace away from propriatery software
such as Microsoft Office, much the way the open-source Linux operating
system has begun to pose a threat to Microsoft's Windows operating
system. "This will have a tremendous impact, like Linux, in an
accelerated time frame," he said.
The StarOffice source code will be made available over the internet on
Oct. 13 and will be managed by Collab.Net a company that provides
"collaborative software services" based on open-source principles.
